OPEN & SHUT; Chronicle of a Changing City

By COREY KILGANNON

Published: September 12, 2010

CORRECTION APPENDED

THE P.S. 185 PLAYGROUND, the city's newest schoolyard, is decidedly old-school, with spaces for skelly, boxball, red light-green light, ace-king-queen and running bases. This revival of old New York City street games is an initiative of the school's principal, Kenneth Llinas, 61, who played them as a child in Flatbush.

''For kids today, there's no more street play, no arguing and working things out on their own,'' he said.

Through the city's PlaNYC Schoolyards to Playgrounds program to open schoolyards to the wider public during nonschool hours, Mr. Llinas sought recommendations from the students and from Rick Bockowski,construction project manager for the city's parks department.

The meager patch of asphalt was transformed into an athletic space; Mr. Llinas even hopes to add an artificial stoop for stoopball.

ASTORIA POOL closed at 7 p.m. on Labor Day, and minutes afterward, a big steel wheel was cranked, opening a valve to the pool's drains. All 1.63 million gallons of water drained out into city sewers over the next six hours. At all the city's 54 outdoor public pools, the draining procedure occurred just about as quickly.

Last week, plumbers at Astoria cleaned pipes and emptied the pool's six 175-gallon vats of liquid chlorine, supervised by Dennis Byrne and Jim Cafaro of the parks department. In the subterranean filter room of the pool, which opened in 1936, they inspected the open-bed gravity system, in which the water cascades onto a bed of charcoal and is filtered like coffee.

''They don't make them like this anymore,'' Mr. Cafaro said.

PHOTOS: OPEN: Sept. 8, Bay Ridge; SHUT: Sept. 6, Astoria

Correction: September 26, 2010, Sunday

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: An article in some editions on Sept. 12 about a new playground in Bay Ridge, misidentified the role of a New York Parks Department official who helped supervise its planning and construction. The official, Rick Bockowski, was a construction project manager, not a design project manager, for the project.